Formally my Samsung A40 has no user replaceable battery. Actually you can find plenty of videos on YouTube that explain how to dissect that phone and replace almost everything. I don't trust myself to replace the screen but I replaced the camera after the n-th crash on the floor (20 Euros) and the battery after 3.5 years (40 Euros). All it takes is a flat piece of plastic to open the frame and glue to close it again.

Was it better when that operation was a matter of 5 seconds? Yes.

I’ve replaced the screen and battery on 2 different iDevices, the scary amount of heat generated by both have completely turned me off to even trying. They absolutely would have exploded at some point.

Now almost everything is glued on. Even with proper tools, opening without damaging is almost impossible.

most of the use cases i can think of would have the phone plugged in somewhere permanently, digital photo frame, home assistant controller etc, so whether the battery is worn out wouldnt matter so much

>whether the battery is worn out wouldnt matter so much

Old phone batteries bloat up and become fire hazards. Ideally, phones could run permanentaly plugged in with the battery removed, but from my experience, they won't even power on without a battery present.

Some laptops too, it’s infuriating.

Isn't this because the charger cannot provide the same peak power that the battery can? I don't know how laptop power supplies work.

were that true the charge time would be longer than the run time (not strictly true, if the load is bursty what you say could conceivably be true)

its somewhat difficult and fussy to do power management in the way you would expect - that the input power is used to power the computer, and whatever is 'left over' is used to charge the battery.

this is just skimping on engineering bandwidth and a few extra components

Yep, purely malicious, no plausible reasons at all to reduce peak power drain on old batteries, in fact - batteries only get better with age!

If we repeat this lie long enough we might believe it ourselves!

Well.... If you cycle a battery between 30 and 80% its lifetime increases by almost 10x. The battery management on phones is terrible. Either the manufacturer is stupid or malicious.

The fact that phones have no option to bypass the battery when plugged in is another obvious decision to kill batteries on purpose. In fact, I built a relay that connects to home assistant to turn off my charger when the phone reaches 80% at night. My battery is much healthier for it. It would be dirt simple to add this option to your phone OS.

> Well.... If you cycle a battery between 30 and 80% its lifetime increases by almost 10x. The battery management on phones is terrible. Either the manufacturer is stupid or malicious.

As pointed out by sibling comments this is somewhat common nowadays. iPhones will IIRC default only charge to ~80% overnight, stay there, and only charge up to 100% when it thinks your normal wake time is approaching. I remember Macbooks starting to do this at least 10-15 years ago. I'm not sure well this aligns as "an obvious decision to kill batteries on purpose". Is it possible that it isn't a grand conspiracy, but instead a natural consequence of having to quality and expense of parts vs what one thinks the market can support?

The other option from your proposal of course is never to charge above 80%, or call 80% "100%", in which scenario you would almost certainly have the same sources accusing them of being underhanded and anti-consumer by "artificially limiting battery capacity".

There is obviously no conspiracy. It's common business sense to not care about battery life in a product with a 2 year lifecycle. The fact that SOME phones don't overcharge your phone battery shows that it's a business decision rather than a technology challenge.

OEMs seem to be getting better about this.

I see batter limiters in MacOS, Samsung phones, Framework laptops, Microsoft Surface devices. Now we just need to normalize it on budget devices.

Samsung seems to have added a battery care feature that will detect if your device is mostly plugged in all the time and charge to 85% instead of 100%.

> It's not the crime, it's the coverup.

They may well had a technical reason, but I certainly don't appreciate them being underhanded about it. I don't have an apple device right now, so I'm generally out of the loop, but it seems like right now people can toggle the slow down, and also go get their batteries replaced. That seems like a pretty good end situation. Did I get that right?

Underhanded? As a response to the incident they have made it so you can explicitly turn it off, sure. But people trust the phone to make a thousand other decisions on a moment-to-moment basis about the tradeoff between CPU and battery, is it reasonable to call it being "underhanded" when singling out a specific one of them retrospectively? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think I know a single person who would choose to trade an hour or two's battery for a 5% CPU bump.

Much like the iPhone 4 reception fiasco. Nothing actually changed reception-wise, except they changed the way they calculated and displayed the signal. But people were now seeing _different_ signal profiles than they expected, and apparently Apple decided (eventually) that changing it back and giving everyone a free case was better marketing that continuing to try and persuade people of that.

It wasn't even trading an hour or two battery for a 5% bump, it was "when you open the camera, the phone rebooted" - or when you did anything else which demanded a short burst of high power the ageing battery could no longer supply. Imagine arguing that you would prefer 'broken phone' instead of 'working slower phone'.

How did we find out about the battery thing?

Haha, you reminded me of the days when some of my friends arguing iPhone's signal wasn't that bad but just could not make the call when everyone else could.

It's never the device vendor's decision to make on how users should their devices. That's not something to argue about.